


whose absence seems absurd

by timetrees



Category: Devils Like to Dance
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Smoking, Unreality ?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-04-17
Packaged: 2019-03-01 01:03:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13283634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/timetrees/pseuds/timetrees
Summary: Revy opened his eyes to a gray, foggy world.





	1. a glimpse of second chances

**Author's Note:**

> yeah lol

_???, 2016. _

Revy opened his eyes to a gray, foggy world.

“Where am I?” he asked. He hadn’t checked to see if there was anyone with him.

There was no answer. Revy turned his head to one side, and then, upon seeing nothing but the horizon, he looked the other way. There was someone standing a few feet away from him, looking away as well. It was a girl, he was fairly sure, with bright red and pink hair, short on the sides.

Revy touched his own hair, self conscious about the new blue color. At the same time, the girl ran a hand through her own hair, angling her head so she was almost looking in his direction again.

She wasn’t, so Revy spoke again.

“Where am I?” he called out. His voice felt faint and washed out in his ears, despite the volume he thought he’d been at.

The girl looked over at him. There was no expression on her face, just a blank sort of disinterest. “Does it matter?” she asked. Her voice was a little rougher than he had expected. He didn’t know what he’d expected.

“Yes,” Revy said. He wasn’t sure why it mattered. He had things to go back to, didn’t he? He might have, anyway. “Where am I?”

“Isn’t it ‘are we’?” the girl asked.

“No,” Revy said, though she was probably correct. “Where am I?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Somewhere. There’s a city, over there. We’re on a beach.”

Revy looked away from the girl and down at his feet. He was standing in bare feet on sand, the solid kind that came after being washed over with water. It should have been cold, but it wasn’t.

He could hear the wind.

“What beach is this?” he asked. “How did I get here?”

“I don’t know,” the girl said again. She stepped toward him at the same time he stepped toward her. They weren’t side by side now; he was facing her and she was facing him.

She had a septum piercing, with a studded ring in it. Revy felt strangely inferior. He didn’t like it when others were more punk than him.

“You’re just as punk as me,” the girl said. Had Revy been talking aloud? “I’m just older. More evolved.”

“Right,” Revy said. “I’m older than I look.”

“You’re eighteen,” the girl said.

“Yes.” Revy blinked, frowned. He didn’t look eighteen. He looked fifteen, maybe, on a good day. How had she known? “How old are you?”

“Nineteen,” the girl said. “Or… thirty-six?”

“You don’t look thirty-six,” Revy said.

“You don’t look eighteen,” the girl replied. Revy thought it should have been angrier than it was.

“I’m tired,” Revy said. “Do you know how I can get home?”

“You have a home?” the girl asked. Revy was feeling sick of not knowing her name, but he didn’t ask. He wasn’t sure if he really wanted to know. It felt too important to ask so casually.

“Yes,” he said. “In London. Not at the beach. I don’t know why you’re here.” Revy frowned. He’d meant to say ‘I’, not you.

“Does there need to be a reason?” the girl asked, stepping out to watch the waves. Revy found himself taking a step, too, fixating on the enclosing shore. Had he been this close to the ocean before?

“No,” Revy said. “Maybe. I want to go home.”

He couldn’t bring himself to leave.

“So do I,” the girl said. Her eyes were closed, Revy noticed. They weren’t facing each other anymore, so he had to lean forward to watch her face.

She had an eyebrow piercing, too, but there was no jewelry in it.

“Where’s your home?” Revy asked.

The girl’s shoulders drooped down. She looked _sad_. “Where’s yours?” she asked.

“London,” Revy said. “Phantomhive Manor.”

“Phantomhive…” the girl whispered, putting a hand over her eye, one finger reaching to her hairline. “That’s fine. You’re some kind of rich kid, then? How’s that work?”

“My brother is,” Revy said. “Or I guess he married into it.”

“Who’d he marry?” the girl sat down. Revy followed.

“Ciel Phantomhive,” he said. “It really weirded me out at first. Ciel’s way older than Jim, or at least he kind of is. I thought he was, but it turns out things are more complicated than that? I never really got an explanation.”

“I don’t care for age gaps,” the girl said. It was a statement, but somehow it sounded like a question.

She had a sort of hooked nose.

“I don’t,” Revy agreed. “But again, it turns out it wasn’t that way.”

“However that way is,” the girl said. She cracked her wrist expertly.

“I thought I was the only who did that,” Revy said.

The girl looked him in the eye. “Perhaps you are,” she said cryptically. “You’re fine with your brother’s husband now?”

“Sure,” Revy said. “He’s actually sort of cool.”

Why was he talking to this stranger about that? He’d never been comfortable with strangers, even when they were his age, even when they were girls. He shivered, not because of the cold that he could not feel, but at the reminder of Araneus and what _he_ hadn’t even been through.

Revy wondered if Alois knew that he knew he was killing off the Trancys. He wondered if he’d even thought to tell him. A few days ago, Revy had wandered near Ciel and Alois’ joint bedroom, mostly by accident, and overheard a conversation with a few of the nasty details of what was happening.

Revy had ran away from there as quickly as possible and threw up.

“I wish this was easier,” he said, or at least he thought he’d said it – the girl was the one whose mouth was moving.

“What is?” he asked. He hoped he hadn’t said it after all, because replying to his own question would have been weird, and people already thought that he was weird.

He _was_ weird, but he felt annoyingly like the most normal person in his family, even as a revenant.

“I don’t know,” the girl said. “Existing. I wish things were simple. Were things ever simple?”

“Not for me,” Revy said. “For you?”

“Not for me,” the girl echoed. “I just feel… lost.”

Revy knew that feeling.

“Revy,” the girl said. “I’m still here, you know.”

Revy frowned.

“What?” he asked.

The girl sighed. “I’m still _here_ ,” she said. “I have to look. Do some meditation shit, I don’t know. I’m here. I wish you knew who I was.”

Revy said, “What’s your name?”

The girl said, “What’s yours?”

 

Revy was sobbing when he woke.


	2. last words of a shooting star

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s nineteen years old. She’s just dyed her hair again, and mostly shaved the sides. She doesn’t know why. She’s not comfortable in her own skin, but she doesn’t think she’d be any more comfortable in someone else’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> present tense? in MY fanfic?
> 
> basically this was me getting sad in a teahouse and starting a fanfic about revy being kinda sad and tired

It’s late.   
The night sky doesn’t look great; there are stars, but they seem to twinkle in and out of existence, just like [SHE] feels herself doing. 

She’s in the city, alone though she didn’t used to be, and feeling a buzz in her ears that she’s disappointed to find fading. 

There aren’t many people out. There are a few late-night writers in the 24/7 coffee shop she’s standing near, but she can’t see anyone going out and about. It’s almost 1 AM.

She swallows, grimacing at the taste in her mouth, cigarettes combined with shitty fast food fries. She doesn’t hate the way cigarettes taste - she can’t, really, with how often she smokes them - but she’d never liked it combined with other things.

She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a few days, either. That probably couldn’t help. 

There’s no real point for her to be out in the city, especially at night. It’s mid-April, and the cold air bites at any skin she left exposed. It’s not summer yet, and she feels like she’ll never experience it again.

Someone passes her by, fumbling with something in their bag. They glance her way. 

“Do you have a light?” they ask. 

“No,” [SHE] says. Then she remembers her eighth grade teacher calling her selfish, and pulls out a mini Bic lighter and hands it over. “Never mind,” she adds, flatly. 

She’d never been the most approachable person.

“Thanks,” the person says. They light their own cigarette and hand it back. 

“Shitty brand,” [SHE] notes.

The person walks away. 

She turns back to the coffeeshop, people-watching the sleep-deprived strangers inside. There’s two teenagers, a little younger than her, leaning on and over each other, giggling about something. 

She thinks they’re probably high. On what, she isn’t sure, and it’s probably bad form to try and score off younger teens. She probably doesn’t want what they’re taking, anyway. She doesn’t need anything.

She slides down the wall, the harsh granite tearing at her skin even through her shirt. She doesn’t know what she’s doing here.

She’s nineteen years old. She’s just dyed her hair again, and mostly shaved the sides. She doesn’t know why. She’s not comfortable in her own skin, but she doesn’t think she’d be any more comfortable in someone else’s.

She’s not looking at the people in the shop anymore. She thinks they’re all wannabe, self-published writers with no real knack for talent, except for maybe those kids, because teens who spend their nights high in coffeeshops are… maybe more complicated than that. She gets it.

She closes her eyes for just a second. Half an hour passes. She wakes up when one of the teens, now out of the shop, pokes her a little, leaned down to look her in the face. Up close, he looks maybe a year or two younger than her.

“Are you alive?” he asks, like an idiot.

[SHE] inhales sharply, shifting to get into a position to stand up, knocking her head against the rock wall a bit. It hurts, but not too much. She stands.

“Yeah,” she says uncomfortably. Her voice is rough. “Uh… thanks for waking me up, I guess. Don’t want to get kidnapped and raped and murdered.”

The boy doesn’t laugh, which is alright, because it was barely a joke. There’s a girl behind him, and she raises her eyebrows for just a second like she agrees, or gets it, or… something.

The boy stands, too, and he’s standing too close to her. [SHE] slips to the side, moving past him. She doesn’t like strangers. She especially doesn’t like them when they’re men, because men make her uncomfortable like wearing scratchy fabric on bare skin.

She walks away from them, quickly, but not quickly enough to make it look like she’s running. She doesn’t run away from things, because she’s cooler than that – or at least she likes to look cooler than that.

She stops at a bridge overlooking a river, or maybe another body of water, she doesn’t know. She skipped too many classes when she was still in school. Not always for teenage rebel times, though. Some days, she just couldn’t do it.

There’s no one around her. Her forearms are pressed to the bridge-fence-railing, hands gripping the underside and she can looking over at the water. It’s calm water, tonight, no ripples really showing. She can see the reflection of the moon, a half-empty whiteness contrasting against the black water.

She’s tired.

She’s out of school, which is good, because there’s no way she could get up early enough in the morning to go if she did have to. She doesn’t have a job, either, which is good, because she has no ambition of anything realistic and she’d never do good in a place she didn’t care about.

She thinks there’s probably books about people like her, but none she’ll ever read, and none that will ever become popular.

She turns, no longer facing the water, and riffles through her bag. There are a few things in her bag: a collapsible hairbrush, a broken Rio PMP300, a cigarette case with three cigarette, one joint, and a lot of extra tobacco and weed just sort of flying around. Also in her bag is her wallet (which has eleven dollars cash in it) and her phone, which is dead.

She flips open the phone, presses a few buttons, and accepts that it won’t turn on. She tries to remember which bus routes she would have to take to get home, and thinks herself into oblivion until she gives up and lights the only joint she had left.

She closes her eyes, and keeps them closed even as she smokes. She’s tired. She would fall asleep again just against this railing, but she doesn’t want any more teens to wake her up, or to somehow fall through, or to get stepped on in a few hours when early risers when on their morning walks.

[SHE] stands up.

And she goes home, and thinks about her life. Has anything bad ever really happened to her? Maybe. Does she have reason to be sad, to be angry, to be happy, to just be? She doesn’t know.

She closes the blinds on the windows in her room, puts in a vinyl record of a The Cranberries album, and pulls her covers over her head. She listens to the music with her eyes closed.

One day to the next.

Until she dies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have so so many thoughts on revy as a living person that i cannot possible put into words. i think she was uncomfortable with herself and her life, and she didn't know what she was doing and she knew that, but she didn't know how to change it, and i think she was tired, and i think she wanted to live but didn't know how to do it right, and i think she was sort of a rebel without a cause. she cared both too much and not enough. she tried to be cool and unaffected but was scared of a lot of stuff in her life. exploring how that leads into now revy... is interesting. very fun.
> 
> comment ur thoughts uwu

**Author's Note:**

> hate and maybe like kinja are the only people who will read this but anyway comment ur thoughts


End file.
